Why It Matters That Serena Williams Keeps Winning

I was 11, a year older than Serena Williams, when her father predicted that she and her sister Venus would dominate tennis for the next quarter century. Back then, the world marveled at his audacity (black girls from Compton winning at this lily-white sport?) and at all the beads they wore in their braids. Now, more than 20 years later and with 40 Grand Slam titles between the Williams sisters, Richard Williams's dreams for his girls have been realized.

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Growing up alongside Venus and Serena expanded my sense of what I thought was possible. I have always seen myself in Serena, in her unapologetic blackness, her muscular body, and the way she looks up to her older sister.

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I never had any illusions of becoming an athlete (my mom tried and failed to make me into a Jamaican track star). But seeing Venus and Serena dominate tennis gave me confidence to try my hand at writing, my true love. If Venus and Serena could win at tennis, and Alice Walker, Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, and Jamaica Kincaid could make their mark on American letters, why couldn't I be a writer? Now, as the summer when I achieved my long-held dream of publishing my first novel comes to a close, it is particularly meaningful to cheer for Serena as she works to stack her Serena Slam with a U.S. Open win.

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Each time I watch Serena win, I feel her victory is in part mine. Each time I see her wins minimized, her mastery downplayed, her body and beauty called into question, I take these assaults personally. I'm not a tennis fan, but I proudly claim my status as a fan of Serena specifically, and of black girls winning more generally. As I work to make my mark on a literary field that, fortunately, includes more black and brown women writers, I look to the Williams sisters and sister writers for instruction about how to handle my successes and disappointments with bravado, resilience, and grace. I've struggled over the years to reconcile my body with American beauty standards, and seeing Serena not just deal with her body but actually celebrate it has been exhilarating, one more note of encouragement to accept my body and focus on its health rather than its appearance.

Though he never hired children to hurl racist taunts at us as we played tennis (as, legend has it, Serena's father did), my West Indian immigrant father did push me, sending me me to prep school and a liberal arts college where I learned how to be exemplary, confident, and gracious in institutions that were at best confused by black girls like me. I know that the solid ground of my parents' high expectations and the insular Caribbean-American community in Brooklyn where I was raised laid an important foundation that has helped me thrive in the face of both micro-aggressions and systematic racism. We weren't Jehovah's Witnesses like the Williams, but my parents did limit our worlds to family, school, church, and the library. My siblings and I railed against our family's rules and structure, but we knew that no matter what indignities we faced at school and in the streets, we could always find solace and support at home.

There's something important, necessary, and sad about the extra servings of self-love and self-care black girls in America must give ourselves in order to emerge from the daily trauma of our lives relatively unscathed.

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For most of my adult life, I idealized Serena's body. Torn-out magazine pictures of Serena have graced the refrigerators of every apartment where I've lived. I admire her athleticism, her curviness, her height. How strange to want a body that the world derides. How disorienting to hear that the body I aspire to (fit, thick, healthy) is wrong, terribly masculine and unattractive. What does it mean to aspire towards a body ideal that the rest of the world finds so ugly, I wonder. In some ways, this is a basic condition of being black in America, to have your very body held in contempt. I know that there's something important, necessary, and sad about the extra servings of self-love and self-care black girls in America must give ourselves in order to emerge from the daily trauma of our lives relatively unscathed. I know that each time a black girl like Serena Williams or Mo'ne Davis or Misty Copeland wins, we celebrate because she is one of us.

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The occasion of publishing my debut novel, which is the story of two sisters who leave their Brooklyn home for Barbados in the summer of 1989, has presented an opportunity to confront, again, some of the biases I've witnessed during the Williams sisters' careers and in my own life. Recently, my students in Iowa told me that some readers were saying awful things about the cover of my novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill, on Amazon. My novel's cover features artwork by Barbadian visual artist Sheena Rose, a colorful self-portrait entitled "Too Much Makeup." A black girl is pursing her full lips. I chose it because I felt that it captured the spirit of the teenager in the novel, Dionne, and because I wanted to share the benefits of the book's exposure with a black woman visual artist. (I've written more about the process of selecting the cover here.) While the cover has received lots of praise, especially from black women who have told me how important it is to see a face like theirs on the cover of a book, you can imagine why some readers were offended by the sheer negritude of Star Side's cover girl, that they object to her face for the same reason so many reject Serena's body.

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I know now that the success of my book (really, even its appearance on book shelves) is a victory not just for me but also for the proud representation of black girls and our bodies. Toni Morrison's Beloved takes my breath away with the scene where Baby Suggs gathers folks around her in a church service meant to spread love and help heal the wounds of slavery. Morrison writes, "You got to love it. This is flesh that I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved." Almost 30 years after Morrison wrote those words, we are still in need of a healing that begins with the revolutionary act of loving our bodies and our selves.

We are still in need of a healing that begins with the revolutionary act of loving our bodies and our selves.

Witnessing the media coverage of Serena Williams' phenomenal career as I've built my own life as a woman and a writer has been exhilarating, thrilling, frustrating, and on more than one occasion, downright infuriating. I have gone from being someone who didn't care about tennis, to, like many black folks, learning the basic rules of the game so I could be a better fan of the black girls who play. (I've had a patient teacher in my partner, who played in an African-American tennis club on the East Coast.)

This week, as Serena moves through the final rounds of the U.S. Open, I'll be cheering her on as usual. As Serena seems poised to win again, this is the question on my mind: How do black women and girls not only win, but also find the courage and make the space to be ourselves while we do so?

Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in June 2015. She graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and lives in Brooklyn.